Anyone who has been around a while or is a student of history will know that shortly after WW2 imported Japanese items were "junk". But their quality continually improved while the US and much of the world continued to dismiss them. By the 80s Japanese manufactured goods and electronics were state-of-the-art and several US industries were caught napping.

I have only been shopping in HF (on occasion) for the last 15 years or so, but even a casual observer would notice that the quality of a lot of the stuff has improved noticeably. We would be wise not to dismiss all Chinese-made items as "junk" out-of-hand anymore